Peter Navarro is the kind of White House staffer you see in TV shows, the kind of brash, in-your-face, fast-talking man of action who only exists on screen and doesn’t actually exist in real life and hasn’t existed in American presidential administrations of the last 50 years, with a few exceptions.
The fact that Peter Navarro does exist and that of all the White House staffers, he was the one who was in the very center of the action in the first Trump administration at a crucial moment in the nation’s history – and willing to invoke the ire of his colleagues to try to protect the lives of millions of Americans – seems like a stroke of luck, or an act of Providence.
“Be tough. You’re my tough guy,” President Trump told him on January 27, 2020, when he needed someone to persuade the members of the new Coronavirus Task Force to support a China travel ban.
Navarro was Trump’s top trade advisor, and a longtime China expert who shared the President’s strong beliefs that China was doing serious damage to the American economy, and to American workers.
The Chinese Communist government had just locked down the city of Wuhan, blocking people from entering and leaving the city of 11 million. On January 17, the CDC had started screening people arriving at major U.S. airports from Wuhan. But it still didn’t seem that the virus outbreak thousands of miles away would become a worldwide pandemic.
Still, Trump wanted to take action.
The next day, Navarro walked into the White House Situation Room on the ground floor of the West Wing and took a seat at the conference table.
“At high noon, directly across from me, sat a small man I did not recognize with round glasses wearing either a grin or a smirk — I could not tell which. When I looked into his eyes, he averted my gaze, and I thought to myself: This could be trouble,” Navarro recounts in his new book due out next month, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.
That small man with the round glasses was Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I didn’t know Fauci from Adam,” Navarro told The MAHA Report, recalling that crucial meeting. “I immediately got into this very heated argument with him.”
Fauci said that the risk of a pandemic was very, very low.
“I argued that even granting his ‘very, very low risk’ proposition, a low probability multiplied by a catastrophic cost still buys you the insurance,” Navarro writes in the book.
Fauci insisted he’d studied travel bans many times and just kept repeating: “Travel bans don’t work.”
Navarro describes himself at that moment as “incredulous,” saying he challenged Fauci, telling him that with 20,000 people coming in every day on flights from China, arriving at Kennedy airport in New York, into LAX and O’Hare, they were taking a big risk by not doing anything.
CDC Director Robert Redfield sided with Fauci. So did HHS Secretary Alex Azar, whom Navarro hilariously refers to in the book as the “ever-preening once and future Big Pharma exec.” So did Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff who was chairing the meeting, who Navarro calls a “closet libertarian in Trump Land” saying for this reason, he was loathe to close any border.
Only Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger sided with Navarro.
At the end of the meeting, things seemed to go the wrong way.
“Mick Mulvaney said, ‘I guess there’s a consensus that travel bans don’t work.’ I said, ‘Mick, there’s no consensus!’” Navarro told The MAHA Report.
He walked out of that meeting, and that night at home, at zero dark thirty, as he describes it in the book, Navarro began drafting a memo.
Early that morning, in the cold and dark, he biked to his office at the White House and continued working on it. In the late morning, he sent it to the staff of the National Security Council with specific instructions to forward it to every principal on the Coronavirus Task Force, which included Fauci, Redfield, Azar, NIH Director Francis Collins and several other heads of agencies, along with all of their deputies and all of their analysts.
He wanted it to go to everyone before the task force met again that afternoon at 3 p.m.
The memo was four pages long and the focus was a 2-by-2 matrix showing four quadrants, each representing a different scenario.
In the first, the flights from China into the U.S. continue and the virus dies out, never becoming a worldwide pandemic. There is no cost attached to this scenario.
In the second, flights from China are stopped and the virus dies out, never becoming a pandemic. This, Navarro’s memo showed, would cost about $2.9 billion, mostly for the airlines in lost revenue and also for the tourism industry in America.
In the third scenario, the flights are stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic. The losses would be $34.6 billion, he estimated.
In the fourth scenario – and this is where the hammer drops – the flights from China are not stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic that spreads around the world. In this scenario, Navarro predicted in the memo that it would cost the U.S. a stunning $3.8 trillion in losses, including “the possible loss of as many as half a million American lives.”
The memo hit everyone’s inbox at noon. And it hit hard.
At 3 p.m., when Navarro headed to the Situation Room, he was blocked in the corridor and told he was not on the list.
They’d kicked him off the task force for tangling with Fauci. But it didn’t matter. Navarro had won.
Everyone including Fauci quickly got behind the travel ban and President Trump announced it two days later, on January 31. There would be no more flights from China coming into the U.S. for the foreseeable future.
The memo had changed everything, putting everyone on notice that if they didn’t get behind the travel ban, they’d be responsible for horrific losses that could have been prevented.
“I was tough with him in the meetings, but I was right,” Navarro says about Fauci.
And getting kicked off the Coronavirus Task Force didn’t stop him.
“The task force was a bunch of bureaucrats sitting on their asses. I just did stuff,” he says.
Navarro became the quartermaster of the pandemic, taking quick action to get masks, ventilators and Covid tests where they were needed, sometimes in just days – procuring a Pentagon plane to go pick up millions of swabs and getting Fred Smith’s help to deploy six FedEx planes to distribute them all over the country.
He sliced through red tape and bureaucracy, working from his stand-up desk in the White House complex.
Navarro is one of Trump’s closest aides – a trusted advisor and China hawk with a PhD in economics from Harvard. Until 2016, when he joined the Trump campaign, he was a professor of economics at the University of California-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. He was a rare breed among American professors, warning loudly of the destruction of the American economy by communist China and authoring several books on the topic. One of them, Death by China, he made into a movie.
His latest book, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison, is a fascinating side-by-side comparing his diary of the Covid-19 pandemic with Fauci’s, and exposing Fauci as a master manipulator, and liar.
Steve Bannon, host of The War Room on Real America’s Voice, wrote a spirited introduction to Navarrow’s book, saying no one was better positioned to say what really happened in the Trump White House in early 2020 than Navarro, calling him “the White House warrior who took Fauci on harder, earlier, and more relentlessly than anybody alive . . . . “
In the book, Navarro calls Fauci the “godfather of the pandemic” as he and the agency he ran, the NIAID, funded the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through grants to British zoologist Peter Daszak and his company EcoHealth Alliance – research that likely created SARS-CoV-2.
He knew exactly what he was doing, says Navarro, and he knew the risks.
“That guy. He’s one of the most evil people who’s ever walked the planet. And people need to know that.”
Navarro was the first person in the Trump White House to say the virus had likely come from a lab. But he goes further than just nature v. lab.
“My concern was not accidental leak,” he says. “My concern was that it might be intentional release.”
Navarro had been tough on the Chinese, and he said it’s clear now that the Chinese wanted to prevent Trump from being re-elected in November of 2020.
“If they did do it intentionally, it was a brilliant strategy, because it did help bring him down,” he says.
Navarro’s Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is set up like a prosecution, laying out the case against Fauci.
In 2024, it was Navarro who went to prison, for defying a House subpoena and refusing to testify before the January 6th Committee, claiming executive privilege. He spent four months in the federal prison in Miami-Dade County.
“I was the only guy in for a misdemeanor,” he says. “Everyone else was a felony.”
He was also the only one who got no reduction in his sentence – a sign of the highly partisan prosecutions of Trump officials by Biden’s Department of Justice following the 2020 election.
But the tables are now turning, with the heat on Fauci as the man most responsible for a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and over 7 million people worldwide.
“He’s in his own prison and the walls are only going to close in more and more,” says Navarro.
[Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is due out from War Room Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, on October 13, 2026. It’s available for pre-orders now.]
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